Actual Discussion

My first thought (and impetus for this thread) was the Gloomhaven series of board games.

Love the games. My group of 4 have played OG Gloomhaven, the expansion, digital, Jaws of the Lion, and now we're about 1/2 way through Frosthaven.

About 10 mission into the OG game, we decided to just do away with the Loot mechanic as it sucked and didn't make any sense whatsoever. Why would you go on a mission, kill everything, and then just... leave the loot behind if you didn't grab it in the middle of combat for some reason? If anything, you'd wait until combat was over and then gather things up. Y'know... like every other game on the planet.

What we do instead is just ignore it unless the mission is one where you're on the run or it otherwise wouldn't make sense to be able to loot the area afterwards (like a collapsing cave or somesuch). We feel it's made the game substantially better.

Good to see you're back!

Taking the bait from the above image.

D&D might apply. Losing (as the DM playing the monsters) means your players are having fun, usually. The best play is to be just difficult enough to challenge the players and "lose".

As DM though, getting to that perfect balance is so hard to get right.

Inventory management systems are absolutely shit and tacked onto pretty much every game they can be. In the best games inventory management is an interesting way of rewarding planning and the actual focus of the game... when it isn't the focus it steals focus. I have a particular memory of having fun in Diablo 2 and getting a rare drop of a potentially useful item while merrily killing my way across act 5.

I stopped killing and mopped up the area, tped back to town as I realized I had no identify scrolls, came back, dropped a shield I'd found earlier, picked up the armor, identified it, dropped it, picked up the shield and logged out.

This may be especially pressing for ADHD people but being forced into inventory management when I want to be playing the game kills my enjoyment - I'll always mod away inventory limits if I can (i.e. factorio stack sizes, skyrim carry weight etc...) and I usually just don't play games to which it's unremoveable.

Now, if the entire game is inventory management I'm actually cool with that - games like Balatro or Dominon where tactical choices around your deck can be insanely fun and the who game is those choices and so the designers have made them fun and interesting... but forcing players to interrupt their game for a less interesting game is fucking dumb and game designers should know better. It's a mechanic that most people just bitch about and there are much better alternatives.

Maybe a bit less dramatic than the provided example, but in Project Zomboid (a realism-focused zombie survival game) zombies are set to respawn over time by default. For a game so focused on realism this never made sense to me- the devs say it's meant to simulate zeds wandering in from elsewhere but there are already methods in game for determining when "peak population" should be. Also frustrating to meticulously clear an area only for them to gradually show up again.

Fortunately, all settings are changeable in sandbox mode- it's actually great for providing the exact experience you're after.